Elephant, to see the

To see all that is to be seen; to get an experience of life at its roughest.

1835.  That’s sufficient, as Tom Haynes said when he saw the Elephant.—A. B. Longstreet, ‘Georgia Scenes,’ p. 6.

1846.  I felt my bristles a raisin my jacket-back up like a tent cloth, so I axed him if he’d ‘ever seed the Elephant?’—W. T. Porter, ed., ‘A Quarter Race in Kentucky,’ etc., p. 87 (Phila.). (Italics in the original.)

1849.  If you think we have not shown you enough of the elephant, but got on the wrong way and slid off backwards, please to mount him and take a view for yourself.—Theodore T. Johnson, ‘Sights in the Gold Region,’ p. 278 (N.Y.). (Italics in the original.)

1851.  I think I have seen the “elephant,” as far as public life is concerned.—Mr. Hale of N. Hampshire, U.S. Senate, Jan. 22: Cong. Globe, p. 304.

1851.  In the Knickerbocker Magazine, xxxvii. 172, a description of crossing the Isthmus of Panama is called “A Glimpse of the Elephant.”

1852.  I’m ruther of the opinion that I’ve seen the elephant! Here I be, come a’most all the way from Washington a foot.—D. L. Roath, ‘Solomon Slug, &c.,’ p. 147 (N.Y.).

1852.  I hev seen the elephant; and more ’n that, I fed with him out of the same trough, on b’iled beans, mush and molasses.—Knick. Mag., xxxix. 534 (June).

1852.  

1853.  Botts, the bully of Butchertown, has been in the western waters, and seen the elephant.—Daily Morning Herald, St. Louis, June 24.

1854.  I am a miner, who wandered ‘from away down-east,’ and came to sojourn in a strange land, and ‘see the elephant.’—Knick. Mag., xliii. 428 (April).

1854.  I had also forgotten that I had seen, not the elephant, as you perhaps thought I was going to say, but the President; yes, I have seen a live President, Franklin Pierce.—Oregon Weekly Times, June 10.

1854.  Freshmen were now realizing their position; they had been initiated in the mystery of secret orders, had smelt fire and brimstone, hung suspended between heaven and earth, learned the action of galvanic batteries, and some laws of chemical affinity, had seen the Elephant, and rode the Goat!—Yale Lit. Mag., xx. 106–7 (Dec.).

1855.  Trot along, b’hoys, keep up with the show, and you will get a good look at the elephant by and bye.—Weekly Oregonian, July 7.

1855.  Those who have never seen the elephant can get a life-likeness by reading this work.—Id., Sept. 15 [i.e., Delano’s ‘Chips of the Old Block,’ describing life in San Francisco about 1850].

1857.  [He had received flattering accounts of the California gold mines] from the few of his acquaintances who had seen the elephant, and had returned with a pocket full of rocks.—San Francisco Call, Jan. 7

1858.  Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have “seen the elephant”?—H. D. Thoreau, ‘Chesuncook,’ Atlantic Monthly, ii. p. 229/2 (July).

1878.  There was my friend Will Wylie, who had seen the elephant in its entirety, from trunk to tail.—J. H. Beadle, ‘Western Wilds,’ p. 45.

1880.  I had been in the mines myself, had “seen the elephant,” and could give them any information they desired.—Peter H. Burnett, ‘Recollections and Opinions of an Old Pioneer,’ p. 305 (N.Y.).